Six years since their last album, Living Colour is back with a hunger. The band’s latest album, The Chair In The Doorway, is a ferocious, take no prisoners, assault on cultural roadblocks and out-dated philosophies. The music, at times, is down right angry. During the track “Hard Times” it literally sounds as if guitarist Vernon Reid is battling with drummer Will Calhoun. And you’d be hard pressed to choose a winner, as both tear their instruments to shreds before the track is complete.
That intensity is part of what reignited the band when they came back from early retirement in late 2000. Over the next 2 years they put together the album Collideøscope which reflected the feelings of the New York City based band post 9/11. The album, while a commercial dud, was revered by the critics. Since then they’ve been on the road, mostly in Europe, and playing in various side projects. Vocalist Corey Glover even took to acting in his portrayal of Judas in the touring production of Jesus Christ Superstar. And starting in the fall of 2008 the band, as a whole, converged upon a studio in Prague to record The Chair In The Doorway.
In addition to the all out raging energy of the majority of the tracks, the album also has a nice balance of styles. The tambourine laced funk rocker “Young Man” is a pulsing, Talking Heads-styled, anthem, while“Method” is maybe one of the band’s best songs ever. It’s a very catchy, post modern, percussive head bopping adventure. Glover’s vocals are delivered in a sly understated pusher-man style and Reid’s layered guitars form a strong soundscape of thick energetic vibrations. But the album’s most interesting gem is it’s final track “Not Tomorrow” which sounds very unique in it’s middle eastern themed guitar runs and polyrhythmic interplay between all the band members. Overall it’s classic, hard rocking, thought provoking Living Colour in all of it’s glorious, spirited, pointed passion.
Glide’s Joe Adler had a chance to chat with Reid recently about the band’s legacy, touring plans, and the parallels between the band and President Obama.
So the last time we spoke, we were talking about your avant garde project, The Free Form Funky Freqs.
Oh yeah, alright cool!
So Living Colour is back full force?
Yep, yep. We’re back.
What’s the plan? Is this a permanent thing, or just an album, tour then back to other projects?
Well Living Colour is sort of a permanent feature no matter what I do. I think that it’s good to be back for a while, but I definitely want to make another Freqs record. I wanna make another Yohimbe Brothers record. I hope to get the Free Form Funky Freqs up to show 100, right now, our next one is going to be 44. The avant garde projects really inform what happens with Living Colour.
So with your new Living Colour album, The Chair In The Doorway, it seems a little more harder edged than your previous album. What pushes things in that direction?
I think it’s the nature of where these songs choose to go. It’s funny because this is the first album where we had the title, The Chair In The Doorway, before we had the song written. Slowly but surely these different things start to emerge like “DecaDance,” “Method,” “Bless Those.” All of the sudden it starts to shift forward. An interesting song in that regard is “The Chair.” We were literally kind of on a mission. The whole idea of the lyric is that everyday people throw on the mask or they put on a uniform. Like when the cop puts on his uniform and becomes officer, the doctor puts on his scrubs. “The Chair” is kind of about the collision between the role that the person has to play and the way they actually are. And when that song came together, in the very end, we were all just crossing lines and Corey came up with, “And then there’s the chair.” It just fit perfect.
Interesting, very interesting. So let’s talk about the upcoming tour.
We haven’t toured America in a really long time so we’re really looking forward to it. It’s no diss to our fans in Europe, but we haven’t toured here in a really long time.
How long has it been?
It’s gotta be back when (Living Colour’s 4th album) Collideøscope first came out [in the fall of ’03] and we did a short tour. We did the bulk of our touring in Europe because, if you remember, America was still in some weird jury lockdown. It was really whacky times, really really very tough times. In fact, we were about to start a tour, we were going to go to Florida to play some shows when the whole thing… we were in a truck going down to Florida on September 10th, 2001.
So piggybacking off of that, how does the political state of America influence this album? I imagine that this album was conceived and created near the time of the last election. Did that play any role direct or otherwise?
Oh yeah probably. In a way there is a very real resonance with the cadency of Barack Obama, because when the band was first forming and getting popular, people were saying it’s not the time, the record’s not going to sell. So it was this strange series of events where one thing led to another. We were not supposed to make it. And it was the same sort of thing, like we can be proud of the candidate, but the notion of a President Obama? Completely mind blowing.
I remember that exact same feeling. I remember when people were like, ‘you’re never going to have anything like that happen.’ I remember being told that Living Colour is not going to make it and it was not by people who were mean, but by people who were well meaning. And I remember how crazy it was when we actually got into the mix. I remember being on tour with the [Rolling] Stones, you know it was great, that it was actually happening. And it depends on what we’re talking about. The conflict is the same but we’re not having the same conversation we had during Vivid. First of all, I love to play “Funny Vibe”, which is a great song, one of the first Living Colour songs. And yet, that type of racial dynamic still exists, but to talk about it again like that, we would be repeating ourselves. On none of the records, do we repeat ourselves. And we do not only talk about race, we talk about life in these here United States. We talk about things that everybody deals with. As well, we mention race because race is prevalent in everybody. Race is not our obsession, but it’s funny because it’s a perception that’s projected onto us. Race is a part of us because we’re Americans, part of the dynamic, but broken hearts have nothing to do with that. And in fact, by the time we got to Stain (1993), the song “Go Away” was really about the relationship that we have to AIDS and that we have to Africa, and that was not the racial component.
We all, in America, pretty much live the life of Riley, even poor people. And a place like Calcutta, you have no concept. I mean you have places (in America) like Appalachia that are really poor but when you go to a place like Istanbul, and Istanbul is a modern city, and they got neighborhoods there that are really kind of lost. It makes you rethink how oppression and economics and things like that work. That’s the stuff that really, I want to talk about because I’m acquainted with that. I got a studio full of gear, filled with it. I drank the kool-aid… like every other American. Confronting those kind of issues, that’s much more what Living Colour is about.
I remember back when Vivid came out, the media attention about you guys always focused on race, but I also remember listening to the songs and getting so much more out of them.
In a way, the conversation about race can be an artificial conversation in the sense that any conversation that focuses on one aspect of life can be. I think it’s useful to deal with race as an absurdity because it is an absurdity.
It’s interesting with race because the conversation too often points to differences when the true differences in all of us are so minute.
It’s absurd and it’s delusional because it’s like we wind up having to play the victim’s game, who’s more victimized, the holocaust victims or the middle passage victims? And that’s a question that, in the end, has no real true answer and it doesn’t matter.
With this tour, are you going to be writing along the way, or just polishing the set? And are you going to bring any of the elements of improvisation that you use with the Freqs into Living Colour?
This is going to be very different for us, a lot of these songs, like the song “Behind The Sun,” we’ve never played live. We only recorded it. That’s never happened. The song “The Chair,” the actual groove, we’ve played that live. And in regards to the Free Form Funky Freqs, that’s where I can be the most far reaching with what I do with guitar. Even with that, there are a lot of times, because we’re clearly improvising, it’s not that I’m just playing straight guitar, it’s a guitar synthesis. And I’ve been using a guitar synthesis, pretty much, my entire career. It’s just a part of what I do. So I think it’s going to be a little bit of everything, we are still going to play our older music, but a lot of the tour is going to be The Chair In The Doorway.
It’s going to be interesting to see the things that we keep and the things that we let go of, since there is a lot of overdub (on the record). Just like when Hendrix recorded, he used a lot of layered guitar, but when he played, he played. So there will be a little bit of sampling, a little bit of this and that. One thing that will be great will be having guitar that’s processed simultaneously through two totally different effects patches, that is something that I started doing with the Free Form Funky Freqs really when we started recording Urban Mythology. So the trickle down is going to show up.
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